


Witch's Parade

by bsafemydeers



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 17:06:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1655981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bsafemydeers/pseuds/bsafemydeers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sis, what happened to you?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Witch's Parade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jessicamariek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jessicamariek/gifts).



Witch’s Parade

i.

 

“Sis, what happened to you?”

 

ii. 

 

Esthar never fails to be gleaming and cold. It’s a beautiful place, she supposes, but it fills her head with the smell of disinfectants, the taste of a bitter pill under her tongue. 

Ellone tugs her wrap more tightly around her shoulders. 

As the lift glides to a stop, she can see a figure in front of the hospital, slightly bent. An old man, she thinks, torn between uncharitably being surprised they would keep someone of no use and uncharitably knowing that old men are the ones who run everything. She stands on the lift a moment too long, for behind her, someone says:

“It won’t wait.”

“What?” Ellone turns to look at the other passenger, a man in a robe. 

“Time. You know, time waits for no one.” She must be staring a bit dumbly, because the man clarifies, “If this is your stop, get off, sister.”

“I’m not your—” Ellone gets off the lift anyway, and moves towards the hospital. On closer inspection, that bent figure out front is Laguna, looking as if he’s gained nearly twenty years.

Laguna lifts his chin in greeting, something like a smile passing grimly over his mouth. “Come on in. I thought you’d want to see him—“

“—I thought maybe you could help,” Laguna says two minutes later.

She stands next to him, looking down at the hospital bed where Squall lies motionless. “I’m not a doctor.” Her hand brushes dark hair from his face. “I’m not even a sorceress.”

“That’s the thing,” Laguna says. “He’s not exactly hurt or ill. The scientists—we think the use of the GFs have finally caught up. He doesn’t remember anything.”

“Squall,” she whispers.

“There’s probably nothing the doctors or scientists can do. But you . . . .”

She looks up, her hand resting on Squall’s forehead.

“Ellone, aren’t memories and time travel the same thing?”

 

iii.

 

With no way to know if it will work for sure, Laguna says they’ll have to operate on faith. After Ellone agrees to try, he seems like himself again. His frame un-bends itself and some of the lines fade from around his eyes.

She finds it easier to believe she can do this, and easier still when Rinoa grabs her into a tearful hug, full of thanks. Maybe, she thinks, lighting a candle to keep back the scent of disinfectant, Esthar has no power over her anymore.

Ellone refuses to lay down in one of the medical beds beside Squall, so Laguna brings her an overstuffed armchair that reminds her of the benches on a train. She breathes in the scent of the candle, cinnamon incense, and lets herself fall back into the chair. 

The connection is tenuous but present.

She tries to call to Squall over the connection, but she might as well be shouting along a rope bridge over an abyss. The wind howls and he can’t hear her.

For another person, Ellone might have stepped away from the abyss and the winds; for Squall, she tried something she had not done since her first visit to Esthar in her desperate attempts to understand the world around her.

She ventures over the rope bridge herself, trusting the slim connection to carry her into Squall’s past and Squall’s memories. Though the bridge sways desperately with her attempt, she sets foot on the other side—

\--and onto swirling, molten ground.

Time compression.

“Not just any time compression,” she breathes, slogging forward towards what looks like Esthar’s hospital. “Squall’s memory of time compression, compounded by the amnesia brought on by the Guardian Forces.”

Her heart pounds in her stomach, right up into her throat. It pounds in her ears and her stomach and hands; it’s not her pulse. There are too many, beating unevenly and erratically.

“El o ne – “

She refuses to turn her head at the fractured call. “It’s a trick.”

“Lo ne –“

Pain curls up in her calves and thighs, the slog of time so thick and syrupy she’s starting to sink. 

“A lo ne ell ne lone – “

“Stop it!” she screams, Ellone alone, and she sees it then. 

A line of little girls in the robes of Esthar, in little blue jumpers, in torn dress, all hopping from point to point, staying above the swampy minutes and hours by jumping along the tubes. One can’t keep up. Far behind her are the men of Esthar, with their guns and needles.

Ellone looks at the hospital. Squall is in there, with all his memories. She’s a good big sister, isn’t she? Her mind buzzes thickly as the connection is tested. “No,” she says aloud, “this isn’t time compression. It’s just a memory. We’re not really going anywhere.”

At the tubes, the little girl slips and falls, crying out, “No, no, no, don’t leave me!” Time bends and swoops and Ellone can see the girl’s round face, wet with tears, her dirty blond hair.

“Ta ke her – “ comes the command of the men. “Sorcere ss!”

She’s not a very good sister, Ellone. She leaves the sticky path towards the hospital and swims for the little girl. For the first time, she can hear the men speaking normally.

“Kill her. We can’t take the chance. Any one of them could become it.”

The gun rises.

The child falls silent.

Ellone reaches down into herself, and watches her hands turn into claws. There’s whispering around her, shades of female forms, women and children both. Ellone. Alone. Ellone. Ellone. Ellone ellone ellone.

Her claws strike at the men with guns and it is

 

iv.

 

“I failed,” she whispers, too weak to refuse a hospital bed. She curls towards the wall. “I didn’t even try to get to Squall’s memories.”

“It’s not your fault. No one could have known it would trigger an echo of the time compression spell.” A cool, smooth hand grazes her forehead.

“Matron – “ 

 

v.

 

“You didn’t even try!” Chest heaving, Rinoa confront Ellone on the steps of the hospital. Her eyes are lined in red, her pretty complexion spotty. “I heard you! You got distracted the second you went in there.”

“You weren’t there,” Ellone says. She’s numb now, looking down at the mark on her arm where a needle had gone in. “You don’t know what it was like. I saw them all, Rinoa.”

“You saw who all?” Sinking down onto the steps, Rinoa pulls her knees to her chest and hides her eyes.

“The sorceresses,” she says. “No, more than that. I think I saw the other girls they took when they were searching for Adel’s heir. But I saw the sorceresses too. I saw what was left of them when Ultimecia devoured them.”

“Like their ghosts?” asks Rinoa, voice paper-thin.

“Maybe.”

Like that, Rinoa is angry again. Ellone doesn’t blame her, not when Ellone failed to do her job as a big sister. “Did it make you think you missed your calling? Maybe it’s not too late to become a witch. Are you sure you never felt bad you missed your chance with—“ 

Ellone can’t see the claws but she can feel them. They tear towards Rinoa and the air screams with a hard, cold energy, knocking Rinoa back into the doors.

“Don’t ever say that to me,” she pants.

 

vi.

 

“I’m not surprised you came out of that with some side-effects. Dark magic, though….” Edea crouches in front of Ellone on the steps. Huge ice crystals melt on the side of the building. Scorch marks mar the lift nearby. “This is sorceress power.”

“I’m not a sorceress!”

“You will be, if this keeps up.” Edea remains practical. Her eyes are unreadable when they lift from Ellone’s elongated, curved fingers. “How did it feel?”

With a shudder, Ellone turns her face away.

“It feels good,” says her Matron. “Even when it’s bad, it does feel good.”

 

vii.

 

Even with Squall still comatose in the hospital, the doctors not wanting to have him awake an amnesiac, Ellone is not unhappy.

“If I’m going to be a sorceress, I think I should at least learn how to get this under control,” she tells Laguna. “Maybe this is a step towards helping Squall.” She looks out at where Selphie and Irvine toss a disc back and forth. “All of them. It’s going to happen to them soon.”

“I don’t see how dark magic—“

“Stop calling it that,” Ellone says, and walks towards the disc game. Selphie lets out a shriek of delight as it courses over her head. It hurtles towards Ellone, threatening a nasty knock to the face. 

“Careful!” hollers Irvine, but he doesn’t need to.

She raises a hand and obliterates the disc with a shudder.

They run towards her, fascinated—Selphie an open book, smiling and curious. Irvine watches her now with hooded eyes. He brushes the hair back from Ellone’s cheek, and she knows that when the pads of his fingers skid across her skin, he shivers.

She watches Selphie to see if it sparks jealousy.

Selphie stares at her with a new expression, but it’s not a jealous one. Her eyes are darkly awed. “Ellone,” she whispers. “You’re gorgeous.”

 

viii.

 

Not a week later and Ellone steps into the bathroom, turns on the light.

She pushes her hair back from her face and sees a jagged, arcing line of silvery purple. It doesn’t wash off, and neither does the dark plum line that sweeps past her eyelid.

The next morning, strands of silver in her hair, lavender budding in her cheeks.

 

ix.

 

“If I go in again, I can control it,” she argues. “I can find Squall and restore his memories. I’ll be able to do it when it happens to the others, too. Maybe we can make it work for every SeeD who uses a GF.”

Laguna stares at her like he’s never seen her before.

That’s true. She’s never been so beautiful.

“Ellone could do it,” Rinoa says, sitting by Squall’s bed, holding his hand.

“Thank you—“

“Ellone could do it,” Rinoa says, “but you’re not Ellone anymore.”

 

x.

 

She doesn’t need to slog through the time compression landscape now. It parts for her, revealing ashen ground below. She strides towards the hospital with long, powerful legs, a black shawl covering her increasingly silver hair. 

The ghosts of the other sorceresses howl around the building as Ellone climbs the steps. “Quiet,” she tells them, and is rewarded with deafening silence. She smashes open the doors with meteors, and the shards of glass tickle her as she walks through.

A cacophony of boots and feet rushing down the hall towards her, little girls fleeing from men with guns again. The little girl with dirty blond hair and a round face falls; the gun rises.

Ellone strikes him down with a bolt of lightning. She can’t get distracted. She is still Sis. She still needs—

“They’re going to kill all of us,” says the girl, haunted and hunted. “They won’t let us turn into HER.”

“You’ll be safe. I just have to get to Squall.”

Small hands tug on her dress. “No, don’t! They’re koming.”

Ellone looks down; feeling her conscious effort to stay focused fraying. “They’re not real. You’re all ghosts. Adel is dead.”

“I don’t know an Adel! They kame and killed my family, men with guns and magik!”

Doubt flows through her. Gunshots sound and Ellone claws towards the sources, dark energy streaking out and cutting at the men. “Squall,” she gasps, the rush of power sending her to her knees. She krawls towards the door where she knows he is.

Her head throbs and though she kan see her klaws skrabbling on the ground, she doesn’t feel anything. 

The little girl is back, her round moon face hovering over Ellone.

“Help Squall,” Ellone begs. “My little brother.”

“I kan do that—“

The impulse takes over Ellone before she understands it’s happening; her klaws reach out for the girl and sink into her belly. Ellone kries out, “SQUALL, SAVE SQUALL,” and her power is gone.

 

xi.

She floats.

“They were trying to kill us.” The childish voice is soothing. “They were trying to kill me. They don’t want me to bekome.”

“Squall?”

“I held up my part of the deal. Witch’s promise.”

 

xii.

 

“Ellone!”

Squall’s sweet pinched face is above hers. There are others in the room, but all she sees is his face.

“Did I save you?” she asks.

“I remember everything,” he says. “Except for when I was out. Laguna told me the rest.” Miraculously, he smiles. “Thanks, Ellone.”

She slumps back into her bed, listening to the chatter above and around her. Quistis is starting to forget things, they say. They should be able to use what they’ve learned. They should be able to use her power—

“No power anymore,” she grumbles sleepily. “Gave it away.”

“Gave it away?” Squall echoes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

She reaches down to find a blanket; Esthar never fails to be gleaming and cold. Her hospital gown slides down her bicep, flashing silver-purple. Squall grabs her arm and traces the line. He looks down at her, starting to panic, and says

 

i.

 

“Sis, what happened to you?”

**Author's Note:**

> This ended up being a lot darker and grimmer than I thought it would be, and slightly more unconventional in shape and form. I realize I may have veered from the prompts slightly as it took shape. It was a lot of fun to write, and I hope you really liked it, Jessicamariek!


End file.
